The 50th anniversary of the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy should
remind us of his primary legacy: The long shadow of unintended consequences
from reckless foreign intervention. JFK’s orchestration of the attempted overthrow
of a foreign regime – Fidel Castro’s in Cuba – is usually treated in American
history as a one-off disaster from which JFK’s presidency later recovered. Kennedy
may have behaved somewhat more responsibly later as he gained experience in
being president, but the failed invasion by Cuban exiles of the island in an
attempt to trigger a revolt against Castro had unforeseen lingering consequences
of monumental proportion for the United States. The often ignored lesson of
such unplanned fallout from meddling in foreign countries should not be lost
on today’s decision-makers.

As a hedge to forestall another such invasion to overthrow Castro – which incredibly
the United States was still planning and the Soviet Union and Castro caught
wind of – the Soviets began to install tactical, medium-range, and intermediate-range
nuclear missiles in Cuba, thus triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK inadvertently
nearly took the world the closest it has yet come to thermonuclear holocaust.
In addition, although Kennedy is often given credit for giving Nikita Khrushchev
a face-saving way out of the immediate crisis, the long-term consequences for
Khrushchev were his ouster as Soviet leader – in part because of Soviet public
humiliation from the episode. The Soviet hardliners who took his place decided
that they would never be so embarrassed again and thus began an atomic weapons
build up to achieve nuclear arms parity with the United States by the 1970s.
The world was made more dangerous by this arms race in doomsday weapons.

Today’s policy-makers should learn from the unintended consequences of launching
such unnecessary brushfire wars but often haven’t. For example, the U.S. attack
on Libya and ground invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, designed to oust despotic
regimes in naïve attempts to remake those countries into U.S.-style democracies,
have all ended in failure or chaos. In Afghanistan, once the United States withdraws
its forces, the emboldened Taliban will probably eventually dominate some or
all of the country, thus rendering futile all the money and lives (US and Afghan)
expended in the long American involvement. If the United States leaves some
forces there, they may be in the worst possible situation – not large enough
to adequately protect themselves from the worsening civil war.

In Iraq, an artificial country in the first place, the US ouster of the only
force holding the centrifugal forces of ethno-sectarianism at bay – the autocratic
Saddam Hussein – left the country in chaos. The only thing that saved the United
States was the ingenuity of Gen. David Petraeus essentially “turning” the Sunni
insurgents by paying them to fight al Qaeda in Iraq instead of US forces. This
Sunni pivot allowed breathing time for the United States to withdraw forces
from Iraq. Even then, learning nothing from the chaos and its likely return,
the Obama administration tried, in vain, to negotiate to keep a smaller US force
in that country (as it has apparently more successfully, but foolishly, done in Afghanistan) and is again
ramping up US military aid as, predictably, the ethno-sectarian violence again
escalates.

Learning nothing from Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States helped oust dictator
Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, a leader who had started to play ball with the West
and had eliminated his nuclear program – inadvertently showing Iran and North
Korea, as did the US invasion of Iraq, what happens to dictators who don’t have
nuclear weapons or who cooperate in getting rid of their nuclear programs. Furthermore,
Libya is now in chaos, with many militias carving out and ruling various regions
of the country, kidnapping high level officials of the Libyan government, massacring
civilians, creating terrorist bases in the southern part of the country, and
sending fighters with weapons from Gaddafi’s huge stockpile into other countries
(for example, Mali).

However, Barack Obama finally has had at least a little inkling about the unintended
consequences of all of these disastrous American interventions. He has limited
US aid to Syrian rebels fighting the autocrat Bashar al-Assad, because they
are dominated by radical and ruthless Islamists. Obama is trying to avoid the
error of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in supporting Mujahideen Islamists against
the Soviets in the 1980s, which inadvertently created al-Qaeda.

Yet in an example of Colin Powell’s original caution before the invasion of
Iraq that “you break it, you’ve bought it,” American hawks have successfully
pushed Obama to re-escalate military aid to Iraq to help the government with
the resuming insurgency. Likewise, as Assad’s forces continue to gain in the
Syrian civil war, hawks will continue their push to deepen US involvement there.

And in their most blatant attempt to start new hostilities, American hawks,
encouraged by Saudi Arabia and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are trying
to impose more economic sanctions against Iran just when international negotiations
to end the Iranian nuclear program are bearing fruit. A sanctions-induced
scuttling of this process would probably cause Iran to unabashedly race to get the
bomb and prompt futile Israeli or US military action, which would at best set
back Iran’s effort to get a nuclear devise by only a few years.

Instead of a superficial fascination and glorification of JFK’s legacy on the
anniversary of his death, the American public and US policy-makers should learn
from the unintentional adverse consequences of his hawkish unnecessary meddling
into the affairs of small, non-threatening foreign countries.

Well then how do you account for the Korean War, SEATO and Nato, Truman Doctrine. I would pick George Bush any day over JFK ,

bozhidar balkas

about "despotic regime" in iraq? iraq was a dysfunctional empire comprising of three peoples living in deep hate for each other.
as such, it could be held together only by violence against those who wanted to break it up.
however, its governance was also sociaiistic.
that may have been another reason why US invaded iraq.
syria, too, is socialist to a degree; thus, west will try to put an end to that!

outsider

Mr. Eland incredibly lays the blame for most of the US military failures since 1960 at Kennedy's feet, even though he has been dead for 50 years. At least Eland grudgingly admits that "Kennedy may have behaved somewhat more responsibly later as he gained experience." But that's the point, isn't it? The cold war warrior who was elected in 1960 was not the same man who was gunned down in Dallas.

I submit the opposite of Eland's thesis could be true. Kennedy, if he had lived, could well have followed through on his stated desire to withdraw the troops from Vietnam after his re-election. At least it's hard for me to believe that he would have turned Vietnam into the nightmarish bloodbath that it became under LBJ and Nixon. Of course, we'll never know.

fruntrow

That constantly "stated desire" has been stated as fiction by every member of the JFK adiministration who had been questioned about it.

Recent scholarship has offered a far more nuanced view of foreign policy during the Kennedy Administration. Jim DiEugenio's essay published this week on the Consortium website is an overview, and demonstrates overlap between JFK's personal concepts and notions of smart governance advocated by Eland. Ultimately, where is real power centered? Presidents aren't always in control of these things.

rosemerry

"remake those countries into U.S.-style democracies," is a clue to the devastating conceit of a country completely ruled by corporations, lobbies and the very rich. Democracy is just a word in the USA, and the vast majority of the people do not matter at all.

Tim

Presidents are puppets. JFK's sin was forgetting who was really in charge. The fact that they bothered to kill JFK suggests he was really trying to change the course of events.

Yonatan

Foreign policy meddling? You mean his attempts to try to control Israel's quest for nuclear weapons?